Newsmakers

What do AccuWeather and bottled tap water have in common? To find out, you’ll have to watch The G Word by Adam Conover ’04, a Netflix series on the workings and failings of government. Nell Minow, writing for RogerEbert.com, calls Conover’s new show a lively examination of the “one out of every 16 people” who work for the government—and how their labor touches every aspect of American life. Each episode begins with a positive story about the work of governance before shifting into an examination of its challenges and failures. “The government is better at setting up systems that work than protecting them from predation by businesses who want to profit from what has already been paid for with tax dollars,” Minow writes. Coproduced by Barack and Michelle Obama, The G Word is streaming now on Netflix.

In conversation with Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Bard alumna Tiffany Sia ’10 and Assistant Professor Sky Hopinka imagined “anticolonial futures for the moving image” for Art in America. Sia spoke to her current interests in the proliferation of moving images on social media and “the idea of film as witness.” “Film is potentially incriminating, if someone is documented doing something that may be considered a criminal act,” Sia said. Hopinka spoke to filmic intentionality, both with respect to its production and its audience. “I’m interested in focusing on very specific things within my own beliefs, family, tribe, or region,” Hopinka said, “not in catering to a white audience or white gaze.”

“Rachel Careau’s meticulous and agile translation of this pair of novels [Chéri and its sequel, The End of Chéri] brings to Anglophone readers some of Colette’s finest writing, rich in the sensuality for which she is widely known — but also in the sharpness of her social observations, so ahead of her time that they come across as radical even by contemporary standards,” writes Tash Aw in the New York Times Book Review.

“Something this common needs to be normalized and talked about,” says Hannah Bronfman ’11 in an interview with Ebony. Bronfman chronicled her three-year fertility journey, including a painful miscarriage, on YouTube and Instagram, an experience she says helped her feel less alone. “So many of us suffer in silence and this kind of just felt like the appropriate thing to be discussing and emphasizing that there’s no shame in this journey,” she says. With the help of a doula and an OB she trusted, Bronfman had a safe vaginal birth at a private facility, an experience, she emphasized, she did not take for granted. “Obviously, that’s not what most Black women experience, and I want to do everything I can to speak out, bring awareness to the lack of access, and share resources to people who need them.”

Bard alumni Adam ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14, cofounders of the Indigenous art collective New Red Order, worked with Counterpublic on their upcoming triennial, which will run May 15 to August 15, 2023, “pulling double duty as both participating artists and curators,” writes Taylor Dafoe for Artnet. The triennial will be installed along a six-mile stretch of Jefferson Avenue in St. Louis, Missouri. New Red Order will produce work focusing on “what is locally referred to as Mound City, partnering with the Osage Nation to make a film documenting the tribe’s efforts to repatriate the landmark.” Alumna Diya Vij ’08 will also curate the exhibition.